Doraemon the Movie 2019: Chronicle of the Moon Exploration

johnbradshaw★ 6

Doraemon, Doraemon!!! How low have you fallen. That is the saddest thing to address for me since Doraemon was my childhood and still my love, where I go to find peace and happiness. The story is shallow as ever. The problems with movies after Fujiko's works run out is that they're so soulless. How amazing and phenomenal his world building was, always so imaginative and beyond my wildest dream, I always wanted to be a part of the never ending adventure that he drawn. His story while was aiming for kids, it always had the exciting and thrilling feelings behind it. The bad guys are verycomical but they're smart and put things to their limits. The new one, they're just the shadows to highlight the generic friendship story that you've watched a thousand times in any shounen movies. You name it, applied the formular and then boom a new doraemon movie is born. At least they tried to keeps the characteristic cast as close as possible but while doing that, they accidentally hold down the true potential display that Fujiko aimed in his story. It just felt like a shell, a copycat with no real understanding of what makes themself great in the first place. Their saving grave are the great animations, very beautiful sharp characters designs and bright enough color to enhance the overall theme of the movie. The soundtracks are great, fitting the atmosphere and some scene feels very emotional. Especially love the ending song, you should hear it. I don't think this movie is worth watching. But I was always a Doraemon fan, oh no, I'm still one. So how sad it is, I will still sit here in my hard wood chair and watch their next adventure.

SapioGalion★ 5

A solid original film (non-remake) that did a decent job with using one of my favorite manga episodes for its premise. The storyline is extremely simple, and overall conflict is easy to understand. This film would likely be extremely entertaining for kids. But as an adult watching this, I did find areas where the movie could have been improved. As with many of the recent original Doraemon films, the guest characters feel very shallow. We don't get to learn much about their personalities. I'm most confused with Luca's character, as his feelings towards his parents feel very inconsistent. I wasalso pretty confused with the whole "my parents created us" idea, which was never fleshed out so we just have to take that fact at face value. The movie again also relied heavily on convenient character settings, like Mozo's physical characteristics that were only used in critical scenes in the climax. Having AI robots in the Kaguya planet also made the build up towards the climax feel really cheap. Goddard's voice actor was horrible - sounded like a cheap text-to-speech robot himself! Finally, the use of the 1,000 year gap in time between Luca's parents and the movie's present setting felt unnatural. I know parts of it was important for how the ending was put together and how they wanted to relate the whole film to the traditional Japanese folktale about Princess Kaguya, but Luca's group really didn't need to be 1,000 years old. Although there were some glaring issues with the film that, as an adult viewer, made the film feel unnatural at times, the overall story and its main conflicts are simple enough that your kids will have a blast watching this. The bunnies are adorable, and Dai Hirai's ending theme was well-written too. (edit: I was sleepy writing this - I don't make a lot of sense here.... might rewrite sometime later)